The cow-shaped postbox stops us in our tracks. “Not something I’d put outside
my house,” my (Kiwi) wife said, after a moment. “Though there isn’t actually
any house,” I added, gesturing around at the forest, which wraps us like a
lush green blanket. There’s an old joke about arriving in New Zealand and
putting your watch back 20 years, but on the Coromandel Peninsula — a 60
mile-long sliver of beach-fringed wilderness two hours’ drive from Auckland,
or a 30-mile cruise across the Hauraki Gulf — the readjustment is more about
outlook than time, the cultivation of laid-back reflectiveness and New Age